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AP English
Exam Prep
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Allegory | a prose or poetic narrative in which the characters, behavior, and even the setting demonstrate multilevels of meaning and significance |
| Anachronism | placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period |
| Anaphora | the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs |
| Antithesis | the rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangements of words, clauses, or sentences (as in "action, not words" or "they promised freedom and provided slavery") |
| Apostrophe | an address or invocation to something that is inanimate |
| Assonance | a repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, usually those found in stressed syllables of close proximity |
| Asynchronous | not synchronous (happening, existing, or arising at precisely the same time) |
| Asyndeton | the artistic elimination of conjunctions in a sentence to create a particular effect |
| Burlesque | a literary or dramatic work that seeks to ridicule by means of grotesque exaggeration or comic imitation; broad parody |
| Cacophony | harsh or discordant sounds used deliberately in poetry or prose |
| Caesura | a pause in a line of verse, in dictated by natural speech patterns rather than due to specific metrical patterns |
| Catharsis | the emotional release that an audience member experiences as the result of watching a tragedy |
| Chiasmus | a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second |
| Chorus | in a Greek drama, a group of characters who comment on the action taking place on the stage |
| Classicism | the principles and styles admired in the classics of Greek and Roman literature, such as objectivity, sensibility, restraint, and formality |
| Colloquial | ordinary language |
| Conceit | a comparison of two unlikely things that is drawn out within a piece of literature, in particular an extended metaphor within a poem |
| Consonance | the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants, but with a change in the intervening vowels, such as cling – clang |
| Dactylic | the metrical pattern, as used in poetry, in which each foot consists of a stresses syllable followed by two unstressed ones |
| Denotation | a direct and specific meaning, often referred to as the dictionary meaning of a word |
| Juxtaposition | The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development |
| Iambic Pentameter | an iambic line of 10 syllables--five feet consisting of two syllables each |
| Idiosyncrasy | an individualizing characteristic or quality |
| In Medias Res | (Latin: "In the middle of things"): The classical tradition of opening an epic not in the chronological point at which the sequence of events would start, but rather at the midway point of the story. |
| Lamentation | a cry of sorrow or grief |
| Litote | a figure of speech that emphasizes its subject by conscious understatement |
| Meter | the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry; this is determined by the find of foot and the number of feet per line |
| Metonymy | a figure of speech in which an attribute or commonly associated feature is used to name or designate something |
| Parable | A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth |
| Parallelism | When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, "Mary likes hiking, swimming and dancing." |
| Refrain | a line or group of lines that are periodically repeated throughout a poem or song |
| Scansion | The act of "scanning" a poem to determine its meter. To perform scansion, the student breaks down each line into individual metrical feet and determines which syllables have heavy stress and which have lighter stress |
| Synecdoche | A rhetorical trope (figures of speech with an unexpected twist in the meaning of words) involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part. A writer might state, "Twenty eyes watched our every move." |
| Syntax | Word order and sentence structure |
| Terza Rima | A three-line stanza form with interlocking rhymes that move from one stanza to the next. The typical pattern is ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, and so on… |
| Trochee | A two-syllable unit or foot of poetry consisting of a heavy stress followed by a light stress. Many words in English naturally form trochees, including happy, hammer, clever, dental, dinner |
| Villanelle | A genre of poetry consisting of nineteen lines--five tercets (a three-line stanza of poetry that typically rhymes in an AAA or ABA pattern) and a concluding quatrain (a stanza of four lines, often rhyming in an ABAB pattern). |
| Couplet | In a poem, a pair of lines that are the same length and usually rhyme and form a complete thought. Shakespearean sonnets usually end in a couplet. |
| Apostrophe | words that are spoken to a person who is absent or imaginary, or to an object or abstract idea |
| Hyperbole | a type of figurative language that depends on intentional overstatement |
| Litotes | a figure of speech in which affirmative is expressed by the negation of the opposite. "He's no dummy" is a good example. |
| Quatrain | a stanza or poem of four lines |
| Oxymoron | a figure of speech that combines two apparently contradictory elements, such as jumbo shrimp |
Created by:
dannerm6
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